Jeff:
Welcome back to the program, my name is Jeff Richards and this is
Paranormal. We've been having a "spirited" discussion, I'll say with Rob Bryanton. He has just barely scratched the surface of his brilliant
book Imagining the Tenth Dimension - a New Way of Thinking About Time
and Space, which is available at tenthdimension.com and also available
directly for sale by you, yes Rob?

Rob: Yes, you can go to tenthdimension.com
and buy the book, but a lot of people buy it on Amazon as well. The only
difference is if you order it from my website you get a free DVD of all
the songs. Because we must remember I started all this as a composer who
had written 26 songs about the nature of reality.

Jeff: And they're brilliantly hidden, I don't want to say they're hidden, but they're at the back of the book.

Rob:
They're at the back of the book but they are connected with little
index numbers so the songs are about different ideas found in the book.
So that was the second impetus for the creation of this book, which was I
went to Australia and on the way back developed blood clots in my legs
which went up into my lungs, and I ended up in the Cardiac Surveillance
Ward when my poor oxygen-deprived heart went into arrhythmia. I spent
two weeks in the Cardiac Surveillance Ward thinking I was about to kick
the bucket, and so I wrote this book in those two weeks.

Jeff: So that instance, that sort of near-death moment for you, really led, and pushed you to put pen to paper...

Rob:
Well, it was because I had always intended to do it. I mean, the 26
songs were already written, right? I knew what the book was going to be,
so it was just finally taking the time to put it down.

Jeff:
Now Rob, before the break I called you an "architect of reality",
because you're bringing some very interesting technologies, and many
people have seen them already I'm sure in play right here in Saskatchewan. A lot
of the technology that your studio, Talking Dog Studios,
has put into place can be seen at various places - for instance, here in
the city of Regina, the RCMP Heritage Centre museum has a brilliant
installation that your group was part of putting together, where you're
on the Musical Ride but you're in reality, you're in this virtual reality
environment which is just spectacular.

Rob: Exactly,
yeah, and the fun thing about the virtual reality then, is it can be
"recorded reality" like that, or it can be a completely synthetic
reality as well, and that's where you can get into doing some really
crazy stuff. So at Talking Dog Studios right now, we're actually building a
virtual reality arcade (officially opened October 14th 2016, The Grid VR Arcade),
which is going to be fun for people to come in and have these kinds of
virtual reality experiences that I can't believe are already in
existence.

Jeff: And I'll say I've seen it, I've been
there. I saw a little video of this thing called Tilt Brush on Facebook,
and I thought "wow, that looks amazing". So I was in Talking Dog
Studios doing the voiceover work for The Other Side,
third season, and Rob says "hey, you're gotta check this out". He puts
this VR headset on me and I'm using that program, I'm at an arcade. At
one point I'm playing this zombie game, and there's zombies coming at me
from every angle, and then I go from that to being a worker in a
convenience store (laughs). For me it was ridiculously cool to be able
to move into all those different realities while still within this
reality. It's almost like we're moving into all these different
dimensions by putting this little plastic piece of technology on our
heads and going there. And your company, Talking Dog Studios, is really
pushing that, pushing the boundaries of that on a provincial level,
which is so spectacular.

Rob: Yeah, and the idea of even, you know, with the RCMP
there's national connections there already. We have done stuff in the
past for the Mayo Clinic, and for Legendary Pictures... a lot of people
know a thing we created for the launch of the Godzilla movie that came
out a couple of years ago. A few years before that at ComicCon there was
an Augmented Reality thing we created where you had the artist's conception of
what the new Godzilla was going to look like on your chest (*on free t-shirts being handed out at the Legendary booth, I should have mentioned), and you walked up (*to the big screen TV at their booth) and the smoke and flame shot out of his mouth... of course, that's "atomic breath" if you're a Fanboy.

Jeff:
Yeah. So these new realities that are being created, what do you think
of that? Do you feel that as a society, as a populace, that we run the risk
of becoming entrenched in these alternate realities as opposed to our
own real physical reality as it exists here, talking to you right now?

Rob:
I'm really starting to agree with people like Elon Musk who are saying
"how do you know you're not in some kind of a virtual reality right now?".
You know, the idea that we could already be a game that somebody else
created. If you're talking about reality coming from this background
that has always been and always will be, then isn't that what you're
doing? When you're moving through the reality right now you're moving
through a set of probabilistic outcomes. So why shouldn't you be able to then cause those probabilistic outcomes to be observed in other ways? With other outcomes? You know, being able to go back and see what happened that time the drunk came over the hill, you managed to veer out of the way, but there's all those other versions that you could go back and see - if you had that ability.

Jeff: Musk says there's a one in billions chance we're in base reality right now.

Rob: Yeah.

Jeff: That gives me goosebumps to think that! You know, to think that we are potentially the product of somebody else's reality creation program...

Rob: But it don't think it's really about reality creation. It's more like a viewing scope that is being moved around through the probability space that always has existed. That's the thing: the distinction between past present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion, and that's what Einstein told us. And that's what you have to understand: time is not the fourth dimension. It's that whole thing from beginning to end, stretching to infinity in both ways and wrapping around the circle.

Jeff: So now. As exploration continues into things like string theory, things like multi-dimensional theory, what's the next step for you? As a - I'm going to call you a researcher. because that's really what you're doing with a lot of this. You said at the beginning that you're not a scientist, but you're certainly a researcher, and you've got a research paper you put together right here in this book. What's the next step for you Rob?

Rob: Well, the core essential truth of the tenth dimension is that it's really just a filing system. It's a really good way from going from that "everything" down to the very specific, that is the point that we're all experiencing right now as we hurtle through spacetime, you know? So being able to find those connections is what this project is all about.

Jeff: Will we find dimensions beyond ten?

Rob: Here's what I think. You've got that background, that Ultimate Ensemble that's back there. Now, if I look at it through a prism of five dimensions I'm going to see it one way. If I look at it through a prism of twelve dimensions I'm gonna see it another way. I'm not saying ten dimensions is the only way to analyze our reality. You know? But if you're thinking about spatial dimensions, ten is a really good, convenient place to stop. Not because we've got ten fingers, but just because the logic happens to work out to the point that by the time you get to the tenth dimension as we're imagining it with this system, we're back out to that Ultimate Ensemble, that background, that Godelian "outside the system" that is impossible for us to do anything to, or react with, because it's not part of what we're in.

Jeff: Rob Bryanton, the author of Imagining the Tenth Dimension is sitting across from me live in-studio in this dimension right now. We're actually recording this interview in 360 degree virtual reality which you're going to be able to see posted later in various channels. Rob, it's been a pleasure. As we leave you now, what's something you want to leave our listeners with? When thinking about the ten dimensions, and just reality in general, what should people really hold as a core concept? Quickly now, in 30 seconds.

Rob: Sure! We start with a point. You are the point. What is your trajectory right now, and is there something about your trajectory you want to change? The fifth dimension tells us that it's there, you can get to it from here, you just have to figure out how.

Jeff: Brilliant stuff. Rob Bryanton - Imagining the Tenth Dimension. His book can be found at tenthdimension.com and the link for that will be posted on our facebook page very very shortly. Rob, it's been a pleasure.

Rob: Thank you very much, I'm a big fan of the show, it's such an honour to be here with you.

Jeff: Thank you Rob. My name is Jeff Richards, this is Paranormal, and we're gonna take a quick break, when we come back we're answering your questions live. If you have something that's been plaguing you, a question about your future and your own reality, you can contact me... (etc.)

In Part Two we get into a metaphysical discussion of ghosts and spirits, and the implications of Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation within the concepts of consciousness and meeting other versions of yourself when you die. We then discuss Dawkins' "River Out of Eden" as evidence of how patterns exist outside of our physical bodies in the same way that my project proposes that consciousness can exist outside/before/after the body that it inhabits. Graham Hancock's Supernatural and David Jay Brown's The New Science of Psychedelics also come up in the discussion of there being evidence of there being more to our reality than the 4D space-time we see around us.

Monday, September 5, 2016

A direct link to the video below is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aMg9jndaL4
If you're on a mobile device and this movie is not displaying properly for you, please try opening the above link in your YouTube app. If you have a headset such as Google Cardboard, you can put this movie into Cardboard display mode and feel like you're actually in the room with us!

Here's the Facebook page for Jeff's show: https://www.facebook.com/Talkparanormal
This is Part One of an hour long interview that covers a wide range of topics, seems like a great way to help celebrate the tenth anniversary of Imagining the Tenth Dimension!

In Part One, we talk about how each of us can be thought of as a spime, or a space-time object, but that we can see ourselves also as a probabilistic cloud. We discuss how physicist Kip Thorne as the scientific advisor on Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, has told us that our reality comes from the fifth dimension, and Einstein accepted the idea of our reality being resolved at the fifth dimension when it was proposed to him way back in 1921!

We also discuss Tegmark's Ultimate Ensemble concept, the amazing processes that create our universe or any other from that background sea of information, and the intuitive ideas that began this project for me back at the age of seven.

Monday, July 4, 2016

It was ten years ago that the internet discovered the
tenthdimension.com website. We
had initially started showing the website to friends and associates at
the end of June 2006.

As I reported on the fifth anniversary of this project:

Initial response was generally very
favorable, and we congratulated ourselves on a site that looked like it
was going to do all right for itself. But we really had no idea what was
about to happen!

On July 2 2006, the site got 2346
hits from 160 unique visitors, not too shabby. Then, some time later in
the day on July 3rd, people started sharing the site with each other in a
much bigger way, and we were thrilled to see a twelve-fold jump -
30,116 hits from 2,196 unique visitors. Cool! But by the end of the day,
we were starting to learn about something known as the digg effect.
So many people were trying to access our website simultaneously that
some visitors were getting error messages, while others were having to
wait minutes for the pages to load. Even with those delays, July 4th
2006 was an amazing day - 451,954 hits from 25,075 unique visitors.

With
the support of users on digg and also on stumbleupon, the site saw over
five million hits that first month, and that was from almost 282,000
unique visitors. Unbelievable!

Ten years for a project about ten dimensions certainly seems worthy of note. My YouTube channel, 10thdim
is now approaching 16 million overall views for the 400 plus videos
we've posted about the project. The original Imagining the Tenth Dimension video started out at the now defunct revver.com video sharing site, where it was at 2 million views when the site was discontinued. I've also seen a great many copies
posted of that first video, many of them taken from an
edited version created by tigger1972, on tigger's channel that version is approaching 500,000 views. At the time
YouTube was limiting movies to just over 11 minutes, which is why the
original movie was broken into two parts for my channel. As a fan of the
project tigger wanted to get the movie on YouTube in one piece, so he
removed my intro and extro screens and all pauses, managing to get the
video from 11:51 down to 11:01.

Then other people posted copies of that version: master roshi's copy is over 900,000 views, Giovanni B's is over 600,000, the Break.com copy is at almost 500,000 views, Andrew Philip's
is over 60,000. None of these people include my name or give me credit
as the creator of the video, but at least they leave it ambiguous as to
who created it... unlike izacboi who brazenly says in his description "this is a short vid i made to help people understand the tenth dimension".

With
my name as the author removed and the text screens at the end removed
(which includes "while this 'way of imagining' is not the accepted
explanation for string theory, it does have thought-provoking
connections to many people's impression of how our reality is
constructed"), there has indeed been some controversy as to my intent
with this project. So at the risk of repeating myself too many times,
let me say once again: I am not a physicist and I'm not pretending to be
one. In Chapter 3 of my book, I say this:

So. Is Imagining the Tenth Dimension a crackpot theory
from a non-physicist with no formal background in the
relevant sciences? Absolutely. I am making no claims at all
about the viability of this theory’s mathematics, as I do not
have the tools to even begin such an analysis. The
suppositions we are exploring here are based purely upon
intuition, combined with a layman’s understanding of the
concepts of quantum mechanics and cosmology. The fault
for any misrepresentations of string theory or the laws of
physics that may occur within these pages rests squarely on
my shoulders, and not with any of the other sources cited
throughout this text.

As a creative person, originally a film/TV composer and now a virtual reality
producer, I have enjoyed all of the wonderful positive feedback I have
received from the many fans of this project. I've often mentioned Madeleine
L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time as having similarities - for my generation, that was the book that introduced young minds to mind-expanding new ways
of visualizing space-time as a structure that can be bent and folded.
Did Madeleine get all of the science right? No... and if someone were to be upset about that then they've misinterpreted the intentions of her book. But as a way to get
people started thinking about how there is more to our reality than what
we are observing before us, I believe both A Wrinkle in Time and Imagining the Tenth Dimension have
served the same purpose, and I'm proud to think of the millions of people who have become more interested in these topics after learning about my "new way of thinking about time and space".

Thursday, January 29, 2015

One of the recurring ideas from this project is how important constructive interference can be in helping to understand how something as complex as a universe could be derived from extra-dimensional patterns of information. How does a hologram work its magic? Through constructive interference. In entries like The Holographic Universe we've looked at the theory that our observed reality is derived from a holographic projection - an interference pattern projected from the fifth dimension.

One of the commonly known versions of this constructive interference effect is known as "Moiré" patterns: one pattern interacts with another, and a third pattern springs forth. So here's an interesting development - my company, Talking Dog Studios, has just released a new app for iOS devices that allows you to play with constructive interference in creative ways. It's called Moire.

Moire (pronounced "more-ay") is a visual toy that allows users to interact with this mesmerizing visual effect. The app lets users explore a variety of moiré patterns, with fascinating shapes they can zoom in and out or rotate using their fingers, or modify by tilting their device and seeing these patterns displayed in 3D space. In some cases the app also responds to sound, adding subtle pulsing to parts of the visuals when music is played. Plus, each time you double tap on the screen you are taken to a new combination of patterns.

Monday, January 19, 2015

Near the beginning of his new book The Science of Interstellar, well-known physicist Kip Thorne defines these terms for us:

...it seems likely...that our universe is a membrane (physicists call it a "brane") residing in a higher-dimensional "hyperspace" to which physicists give the name "bulk"...

Later on, in Chapter 22, he speculates on what it would be like to be an awareness residing within this "bulk":

If there are bulk beings, what are they made of? Certainly not atom-based matter like us. Atoms have three space dimensions. They can only exist in three space dimensions, not four. And this is true of sub-atomic particles as well. And it is true also of electric fields and magnetic fields... and the forces that hold atomic nuclei together.Some of the world's most brilliant physicists have struggled to understand how matter and fields and forces behave if our universe really is a brane in a higher-dimensional bulk. Those struggles have pointed rather firmly to the conclusion that all the particles and the forces and all the fields known to humans are confined to our brane, with one exception: gravity, and the warping of spacetime associated with gravity.

So. The world we see around is confined to a 3D brane, but we need the fourth dimension to change from state to state, and Thorne embraces the idea that there is at least one more dimension, a fifth dimension, with which we could be interacting. Beyond that he acknowledges that this extra-dimensional "bulk" probably exists, but as we quoted him to say last entry, "for practical purposes, the number of extra dimensions is really only one".

Confusing? Here's a few key points to keep in mind. If we're talking about our observed reality being derived from ten dimensions, then it's impossible to consider any one of those dimensions without also acknowledging that they are connected to each other, and that each dimension has to be considered a subset of the additional ones if we're going to be consistent in our logic. So the 3D membrane of our universe resides within 4D space-time, which resides within the fifth dimension, and so on. Each additional dimension adds another degree of freedom, a way to get to states not previously accessible, until we get to the place where the potential for every possible configuration exists simultaneously. Reducing the number of dimensions being considered, then, has to represent a paring away, a reduction in possibilities that occurs incrementally as each dimension is removed, and would be a way to see how some other universe with different physical laws could exist within its own unique version of the third dimension: just as real as, but completely inaccessible from, our own version of the third dimension.

This is what's so powerful about the point-line-plane postulate: it gives us a way to start from our universe of three space dimensions, a universe already absolutely mind-boggling in its size and complexity, and visualize how that is only a tiny slice of the possibilities being added with each additional dimension.

Who's There to Greet Me When I Die?Your Sixth-Dimensional Self is one of my earlier blog entries, from back in July 2007. Here's how I concluded that one:

What does timelessness mean for me? Because time is an illusion, it means that once any of us breaks out of our physical reality, there we will find all the other branches of our sixth dimensional selves, waiting to greet us and compare notes on the journey, and see how everything fits together.

Do you see how this relates to some of Interstellar's more "out there" implications we explored a few weeks ago in Interstellar and Pendulum Clocks? Each of us, when we stop to think about it, must have near misses that could have turned out much worse, minor accidents that could have been major. Everett's Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics proposes that all the other versions of the universe where the other different probabilistic outcomes occurred actually do exist, they're just not part of the current version of the universe we're observing. So each of us already have died in some of those previous near misses we can look back upon from today.

If there are ways that awareness can continue on after death, then it stands to reason that the versions of me that were not so fortunate in those past events might still be interested in following along to see "what happens next". So here's an interesting thought: we hear from psychics and near-death researchers all the time about the loved ones that will be there to meet us when we die. But wouldn't it be likely that one group waiting to meet with us, and compare notes on how lucky we were to have lasted as long as we did, be the other versions of ourselves that had already died? What a reunion that would be!

To conclude, here's a video from early 2009 in which we look at some other ideas related to imagining ourselves as viewed from the extra dimensions beyond space-time: "You Have a Shape and a Trajectory".

Monday, January 12, 2015

Although superstring theory says the bulk has six more dimensions than our universe, there is reason to suspect that, for practical purposes, the number of extra dimensions is really only one.

- Kip Thorne, from his new book The Science of Interstellar

Why does Kip Thorne - one of the world's most respected physicists - tell us that it's fair game to refer to the fifth dimension as somehow including all of the other dimensions? Can we really ignore the rest, and say that beyond our 4D space-time there is really only one more dimension that matters?

I think this agrees very nicely with my contention that our observed space-time reality is actually being derived from the fifth dimension.

Patterns of Information

Ultimately we're just talking about extra-dimensional patterns of information, and how their configuration has created a unique universe such as ours. As creatures made of atoms and molecules that are confined to a 3D brane using the fourth dimension to change from state to state, most of the interesting stuff for us really is just at the fifth dimension: the dimension which Einstein accepted is where the field equations for gravity and light are resolved, the dimension I insist Everett must have been pointing to when he said his probabilistic "Many Worlds" occur within a sub-space which is orthogonal to space-time.

So what's beyond the fifth spatial dimension?

The point-line-plane postulate tells us that each time we want to get to an additional dimension, we have to imagine a point not found in the current system, the current "dimension" (no matter what you're defining that word to mean). So to get to the sixth dimension as a mental construct, we have to think about the things that would be impossible to observe from the fifth dimensional point that represents our observed reality right here and right now. And as I've said before, if you're thinking about an underlying extra-dimensional form which includes all possible universes, all possible patterns of information, then for us everything up to our version of the fifth dimension includes the patterns that align to create our unique universe, the one we are currently observing, and everything beyond this fifth dimension is a way of thinking about the other patterns that could have aligned to create some other universe different from our own.

Information Equals Reality

Quantum physicists like Seth Lloyd and Anton Zeilenger use this phrase to talk about their work: "information equals reality". Are you and I and the world we see around us really just patterns of information? If that's the case, then I'm proposing that each awareness within this observed reality is just a pattern recognizing itself. And when we back our theoretical viewpoint out to the biggest picture of all, we are seeing an underlying sea of potential information, some of which creates patterns that are static and unchanging, some of which are like you and I: moving patterns that grow and change. All of those potential patterns considered together cancel each other out to become a perfect and naturally balanced symmetry state, and a universe such as ours results from a breaking of that symmetry. Gevin Giorbran described this idea so eloquently in his fascinating masterwork, Everything Forever: Learning to See Timelessness.

Incidentally: in the years since Gevin's untimely death, there has been evidence that this "supersymmetry" notion, at least as physicists have described it up to now, doesn't jive with the underlying structures of our reality being revealed by the LHC. Does that matter? That depends on whether you're willing to look at randomness and chaos as being another way of describing the same "everything" from which our universe or any other is derived. Because whether we came from nothing or whether we came from everything may simply be different ways of describing this underlying information that becomes our reality.

When the Pattern Recognizes Itself

Haven't we all been fascinated to look in the eyes of another living being and glimpse that spark of awareness, perhaps alien to our own but still hauntingly familiar? And isn't the mounting interest in Artificial Intelligence part of this discussion?

In The Imitation Game, we see an amazing performance from Benedict Cumberbatch, no doubt one of the finest actors of his generation. That film, like Her, encourages us to consider the possibility that a machine, a dance of electrons within a collection of circuits, could develop this same kind of awareness: perhaps alien to our own but still hauntingly familiar. The alarm being raised lately by luminaries like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk* about the coming dangers of AI may have to be accepted as yet another stage in the evolution of life on this planet.

Life Recognizes Life
The beginning of life in the primordial ooze, I've proposed, can be thought of as an extra-dimensional pattern which recognizes that if it chooses "this path rather than that one" from its fifth dimensional probability space, it will be more likely to continue. Could a "desire for continuance", then, become a handy delineator for saying which things are alive and which are not? If we were able to observe our reality from "outside" the fifth dimension, I believe that these patterns that represent life, awareness, and even those "spooky" connection patterns like the ones we looked at last entry, would be immediately apparent.